By day and by night, it wears two faces. In July in Tobata, in Kitakyushu, four great floats move through the streets. By day they are nobori-yamagasa: a tall platform hung with red and white banners and a send-off panel embroidered in gold and silver thread, formal and ornate. By night everything is stripped away, and on the same platform the crew stacks three hundred and nine paper lanterns in twelve tiers—a pyramid of light nearly ten meters tall. To the call of "yoitosa, yoitosa" the young men lift it, and the red tower sways slowly through the dark. People call it, simply, the lantern mountain. The festival began in 1803. Plague had spread through Tobata, and when the people prayed to the deity Suga and it passed, they built a float in thanks. That was more than two hundred and twenty years ago. Four floats, kept by three shrines, have carried the tradition ever since. Together with the Hakata and Kokura Gion festivals it is one of Fukuoka's three great summer festivals—a national Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property, and part of the UNESCO-listed float festivals. The great moment comes on the middle evening, at the competition before the Tobata ward office, where four large floats and four smaller ones carried by junior-high students gather in the dark. Go after sunset, and wait for the banners of the day to become the lanterns of the night. When the red tower begins to sway, you understand something about why a town keeps a thing like this alive for two centuries.